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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27501076">your apple has been rotting</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/valleyofmidnight/pseuds/valleyofmidnight'>valleyofmidnight</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood and Gore, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Drinking</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-08 02:48:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,017</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27501076</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/valleyofmidnight/pseuds/valleyofmidnight</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean keeps talking about going after the demon that did it. Dean keeps talking about killing himself. They don't sound too different.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dean Winchester &amp; Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>49</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>your apple has been rotting</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>unbeta'd and mostly unedited so sorry for any tense slips or anything</p><p>writing has been slow lately so . take this small fic as an offering</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He hasn't been able to sleep in days. The motel room trembles with some resilient restless energy, and Dean, not one for a full night's sleep even on the calmest nights, is making this worse with his drunken shakiness. </p><p>They can't be surprised this day has come. In their dad's line of work, this type of thing was always inevitable; from the pitied looks their dad's friends gave them to the quiet whispers, pleas for John to find any sort of normal life-- they've been waiting for this. </p><p>Dean hasn't cried since they got the news. Neither of them wanted to leave the motel. </p><p>Both of them stopped going to school, the veil between them and the rest of the world only strengthening. It was clear now that they were only ever one step away from losing whatever place they had in everyone else's world. Just like their dad, Sam thought, one day, one moment, and the suspension of disbelief that everyone else lived under snaps, kicks them out completely.</p><p>Dean keeps talking about going after the demon that did it. Dean keeps talking about killing himself. They don't sound too different. </p><p>Dean keeps talking in his sleep. You watch as the motel moonlight reaches his face, skips on every single one of his fading freckles. He feels like a car wreck, or a natural disaster, the cells of his body pushing guilt into the blood of his brain. He is the wreck, he is the body trapped inside. </p><p>Dean, lately, has taken every single red blood cell in his body and shred it to pieces. He has crawled inside Sam in the middle of the night, found his hands covered in the imperfect bleeding, and found space for himself next to it. He settles more in Sam's throat as of late, cutting off his oxygen, cutting off his words. The tape his voice is printed on skips and rattles behind your sternum. </p><p>Dean pulls off blood and carnage well. His eye still hasn't completely healed, and there's bruises all over him, scrapes and cuts on every joint of his body. Sam's pulled him back together as best he can, bandaged everything he could stand to touch. And that was the problem, wasn't it. Even now, with their world coming to the bluntest confrontation with reality, Sam couldn't accept the center of his world, the reason he was so willing to patch Dean up, let him talk about death and dying like he was destined for anything other than divine immortality. Sam couldn't understand it. </p><p>See, Dean, in his drunkenness, in his habits, in his destructive coping mechanisms and his tendency towards self-hate and cynicism, was still the model son John wanted. Which was, honestly, probably due to all of those things. But Dean could rest easy knowing that John didn't regret raising him. </p><p>Sam, on the other hand, was a baby born of regrets. A son born into flames without ever escaping them. The feeling of rejection, of complete unbelonging-- like a flu he can't shake, a virus that's been colonizing his cells for his entire life. And every decision, every movement was made under the cloud of knowing this isn't where he was meant to be, that he was meant to be nowhere at all. He was meant to be scattered into dust, soul pulled into hell, the marrow sucked out of his very bones. </p><p>And so when Dean talks about hating himself, Sam can barely contain a skeptical eye, a raised brow. How would Dean know anything of hating himself? How would Dean know about the kind of hate that doesn't soak up whiskey but spits out blood, displaces air. Sam couldn't imagine him understanding. Because even if he didn't have the rest of the world, he had Dad. </p><p>Even when all the air was sucked out of the room, even when there was hardly room to breathe, Dean could still spout of stories about Dad, could tell them in this wistful nostalgic tone. All of Sam's stories, all of his memories with Dad that didn't involve Dean, were unspeakable, locked away behind layers of dreams and half-imagined lies he's pushed onto himself. Ways of coping that crowded reality. </p><p>In their dad's line of work, this was always inevitable. Sam had been waiting for the day. Sam had been waiting for the day that the bed sagging behind him didn't mean a rough beard scraping his neck, a hand around his small waist. Waiting for the day that the maggots and worms ate the heart out of John, all of his desire going with it. </p><p>That simmering anger had nowhere to go but his nightmares: a dead, bloated corpse of his dad stumbling towards him, shedding his bruised skin, head hanging on by a strip of bare tendon, but his mouth moving anyway, his voice crawling out of his chest and into Sam the same way his hands did. Sam would wake up in a sweat, quickly followed by Dean nearly falling off the other bed. </p><p>And Dean would look over at him. And Sam would think about his head popping off and dangling upside down by a bare tendon. And Sam would go back to sleep. </p><p>Bobby comes to check on them as soon as he's able, claps Dean on the shoulder and tells him he's a good man for taking care of his family. All sixteen years of Dean's life seem to unfold at once, rebinding themselves into the structure laid out for him. All of the whiskey Dean had drank, the empty bottles left behind like inheritance, all the beer bottles and the readymeals, all of it was the exact sort of life he belongs in. He accepts it with the kind of naive grace that comes from loyalty.</p><p>Sam tags along in Bobby's car, sits in the back with Dean, thinks about reaching for Dean's hand, thinks about making sure they aren't the same hands that crawled belly-first inside him. </p><p>He stays still, the truth too amorphous to claim for his own. The car rumbles on across the state line.</p>
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